2016 Jim Goldstein Project

The Gift of Time Continues –
During the course of the last two years…
through the generosity of my wife’s continuing gifts of time, I’ve managed to occasionally get away for short photographic excursions to various places nearby. I visited the coastline of both North and South Carolina in winter and the mountains along the Blue Ridge Parkway in both spring and fall; and there were always spur of the moment opportunities at nearby Jordan Lake that popped up when it seemed something special was about to happen in the sky. I also pushed my personal envelope, with the help of a few friends, to include some abandoned homes and buildings that, like any landscape, will speak to us if we take the time to listen. But during the early autumn of 2016, I was able to embark on another trip out west, this time for two weeks instead of the month-long trip I took in 2014. No matter how long, each trip offers the opportunity to fully immerse myself into photography where each day, from well before dawn until my final waking moment, I am nothing more than a search engine seeking exciting subjects, and that elusive luscious light to put before my camera’s lens. That immersion can find me thinking about the present day, confronting the throng of tourists or just absorbing the land, looking out at a vast expanse, enjoying a quick snack. Or it may find my thoughts wandering along the steady stream of a flat valley or the stream of visitors from a hundred years before. But I truly get lost thinking about those first human discoverers of that place, and how their senses must have felt being the first to ever see such a sublime setting well before the onslaught of those who followed. And even further back into the recesses of geologic history, imagining what natural forces so slowly shaped the landscape over eons of tedious toil. Or maybe seeing the evidence of a cataclysmic occurrence that blasted what once was into what we see today. I wish that I could be a “fly on the wall” of geologic time, watching the fast-forwarding of many millions of years where mountain ranges are formed and then torn down; watching as rivers slowly erode their banks, cutting deeper and deeper to slice open the earth and lay bare their history; to quickly see as each strata of sedimentary rock was laid down, compressed and formed into rock; to be able to reach the stars in the heavens in just a few moments instead of unimaginable light years. It is my imaginings of these events that forms the deep connection I seem to enjoy with the earth. Along with the many, momentary observations of my surroundings each day, these gifts of time have allowed me to better comprehend and appreciate the importance of what lies beyond my bubble.